What started as a pastime in college is today a successful startup by a group of Bhubaneswar-based students — Brogels is an online community for geeks, innovators, students, movie buffs and entrepreneurs to share information on trends and happenings in their network. It is not just a blog; it is an e-commerce platform and also acts as a social network. Available as a website and a mobile app, Brogels was founded by Sidharth Das in 2012. His friends Kishan Mishra and Ankit Tripathy came on board later.
All of them are students of KIIT University. While Sidharth graduated in mechanical engineering and has been placed in TCS, Kishan works in Brogels as chief marketing officer and is doing his MBA (marketing) from KIIT School of Management. Ankit, who works as chief strategy officer, is an undergrad in mechanical engineering. “It’s a social media platform where you can get information on Indian brands, culture and lifestyle. It’s an initiative to connect the lifeline of 120 crore Indians to rest of the world through internet. I started it from my college library and with some knowledge on web designing, I set up a Wordpress blog. For hosting, I borrowed some money from Kishan,” says Sidharth. “I had a passion to write tech and social media reviews about popular brands like Facebook, Apple and YouTube. Through Brogels, passion soon became a profession when we started generating revenue from Google Ads.”
Sidharth feels the main reason why smaller Indian tech firms, startups and lifestyle outlets can’t reach a global platform is because of huge brands like Samsung, Apple and Manchester United. “They have innovative social media platforms to share their trends. But there was no such Indian social media platform which exclusively speaks about Indian brands and thus, Brogels was born,” he says.
When Sidharth started, he had a poor knowledge on how to keep a tab on trends on the social media. The learning process, however, never stopped and now Brogels has 11,660 subscribers. “The biggest milestone was achieved when we made it to Webit Expo, world’s largest digital expo in Istanbul with world rank 3,” he says.
The three youths, who were later joined by two friends — Swagat Das as senior editor and Vishwanath Krishnan as chief financial officer, want to make Brogels a leading information dotcom of India in the years to come. For this, they are looking for partnerships to add value to the information business. “Social media is not about how you do it; it’s how well you can do it. We will be creating a talentpool to make a great company. Our target is to create 10 million audiences in a span of two years,” he says.
— diana@newindianexpress.com